We exploit exogenous shocks to institutional investor portfolios to show that managers engage in significantly more corporate misconduct when institutional investors are distracted. This relationship is more pronounced for firms with weak internal and external governance and for firms where...

Many mergers destroy shareholder value because managers intentionally waste corporate resources to pursue private benefits. Using textual analysis, we link industry conditions as reflected in acquirer peers' 10-K statements to acquirer announcement abnormal returns. We find that more negative...

Why does the market react to companies’ announcements of strategic alternatives with a +5.2 percent return, only to experience a future return of -9.7 percent? We find evidence consistent with a mispricing explanation in that: (i) investors and analysts are overly optimistic about a potential...

Perhaps the most important corporate law debate over the last several years concerns whether directors and executives should manage the corporation to maximize value for investors, or also take into account the interests of other stakeholders, or society. But, do investors themselves wish to...

I analyze attention-induced stock repurchases. I hypothesize that firms that announce an open market repurchase program of a certain size are likely to follow through to a larger extent if they receive greater investor attention to their repurchase behavior. I test this hypothesis using 10-K and...

Encouraging consumers to seek out and switch to lower-rate mortgages is important both for the individual consumer's finances and for functioning competitive markets, but switching rates are low. We conducted an experiment with mortgage-holders to test whether official advice on how to select...

This paper lays out some of the basic concepts surrounding financial inclusion, including access to banking, digital payments and financial literacy, as well as markets for health insurance, crop insurance, agricultural credit, small firm finance, and microcredit/ microfinance. It goes on to...

Financial inclusion or access to financial services, is a major development goal for all nations across the globe. Financial inclusion does not concern only "access, but also the "use"" of financial services. This paper examines the loan taking behavior of individuals based on survey of 844...

Psychology considers self-control failure, i.e., the inability to resist certain behaviors and impulses when seeking to achieve future goals as a major human pathology. The finance literature models and applies self-control failure to explain time-inconsistent behavior such as under-saving and...